EU ministers to back sending forces to Central African Republic

European Union foreign ministers are expected to agree on Monday to send up to 1,000 soldiers to help stabilise Central African Republic, the EU's first major army operation in six years, EU officials said on Friday (17 January).

The intervention by the 28-nation bloc comes after a senior UN official warned on Thursday of the risk of genocide in Central African Republic without a more robust international response to communal bloodshed.

Foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday are set to approve the broad outline of a plan to send EU peacekeeping troops. Detailed military planning and UN Security Council authorisation will be needed before the troops are sent.

Diplomats said the EU force could start arriving in Central African Republic by the end of February. "The idea is to have deployment as rapidly as possible," one official said.

The EU has 7,000 staff deployed around the world on 12 civilian missions and four military operations, including combatting piracy off Somalia and training the Mali army.

But this will be the EU's first land operation since it sent a force to eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic in 2008 as part of regional efforts to deal with the Darfur crisis in Sudan, an EU official said.

Central African Republic descended into chaos after a mostly Muslim rebel coalition, Séléka, seized power in March, unleashing a wave of killings and looting that sparked revenge attacks by Christian militia.

More than a million people have been displaced by the violence since Séléka installed their leader Michel Djotodia as interim president. Djotodia resigned last week.

Over 1,000 people were killed last month alone in the capital Bangui.

France has sent 1,600 troops to its former colony, operating under a UN mandate to assist an African Union (AU) force that is due to be bolstered to 6,000 peacekeepers.

The EU intends its mission to be a bridging force which will hand over to the AU force in four to six months. The EU contingent is expected to be based around Bangui, including the airport, to protect civilians.

The European force is expected to be battalion-strength, roughly 700 to 1,000 soldiers, one official said. However, another diplomat said it may be smaller at 400 to 600 soldiers.

Once ministers have approved the outline of a mission, EU member states will be asked to pledge troops. Some of the EU's largest countries including Britain, Germany and Italy do not intend to send troops, diplomats say.

Belgium and Estonia have said they could send troops as part of an EU mission and Poland and Sweden could also possibly contribute, as well as France, EU diplomats said.

UN forces needed

Meanwhile, the EU's humanitarian aid commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva, said on Friday that "a U.N. peacekeeping operation must be looked into very seriously".

"While it is very good for Africans to help each other, Central African Republic, being where it is, makes it more difficult, more complex for an African solution because of the complicated relations between Chad and Central African Republic," she said.

"The Central African Republic is bad, but it is not yet Somalia, it is not yet al Qaeda, al Shabaab, Boko Haram territory. We act now, it doesn't turn into one, but it would take a very strong effort," Georgieva said.

Georgieva is due to host an aid conference on the Central African Republic in Brussels on Monday.

"The donor community now has a chance to redeem itself because CAR has been an aid orphan for many, many, many years and that has contributed to the weakness of the country, it has been forgotten by the world," she said.

Background

Speaking to EURACTIV last July, EU Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva called the Central African Republic, a former French colony of 4.6 million people, “the country that the world forgot”.

Georgieva said the Central African Republic, or CAR, was in "complete chaos" while adding that Niger, northern Mali and Sudan's Darfur region were also plagued by lawlessness.

Some 91% of the humanitarian disasters occur off the radar screen, she said, saying that millions of people suffered and hundreds of thousands were dying in overlooked conflict areas with little attention for the outside world.

Georgieva said she was taking the CAR case “very personally,”, pledging 15% of her the humanitarian budget to “forgotten crises”.

Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs has agreed that foreign aid funds also would be dedicated to such areas, she added.